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Free Speech and Hostile Environments

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Free Speech and Hostile Environments Reprinted from 99 Columbia L. Rev. (1999). Copyright Jack M. Balkin 1999. All rights reserved. FREE SPEECH AND HOSTILE ENVIRONMENTS J.M. Balkin* One major concern about sexual harassment law is that employers will restrict employee speech in order to avoid hostile environment liability, thus violating free speech principles. In this Essay, Professor Balkin argues that this “collateral censorship” is constitutionally permissible when there are good grounds for vicarious liability. Because employers actively control workplace culture, and because they are better able to prevent hostile environments than individual employees, vicarious liability for employee speech is more justified than in the case of distributors or common carriers. Professor Balkin also argues that captive audience doctrine, generally thought to apply only to speech in the home, is actually better suited to workplace speech. Hostile environments are a method of sex discrimination that maintains gender segregation; a hostile environment does its work precisely through making the employee a captive audience. The Essay concludes that First Amendment challenges to sexual harassment law should not become a defense of employer prerogatives presented in the guise of worker liberties. Without the incentives created by sexual harassment law, employees will not be freed from censorship; they will simply be remitted to the economic and social control of employers. Does sexual harassment law conflict with the First Amendment? A number of commentators now argue that it does.1 Generally, these * Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment, Yale Law School. My thanks to Bruce Ackerman, Akhil Amar, Ian Ayres, Dan Kahan, Sandy Levinson, Vicki Schultz, Reva Siegel, and Eugene Volokh for their comments on previous drafts. 1. See, e.g., Kingsley R. Browne, Title VII as Censorship: Hostile-Environment Harassment and the First Amendment, 52 Ohio St. L.J. 481, 548 (1991) [hereinafter Browne, Title VII as Censorship]; Kingsley R. Browne, Workplace Censorship: A Response to Professor Sangree, 47 Rutgers L. Rev. 579, 580–85 (1995); Jules B. Gerard, The First Amendment in a Hostile Environment: A Primer on Free Speech and Sexual Harassment, 68 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1003, 1033–34 (1993); Eugene Volokh, Freedom of Speech and Workplace Harassment, 39 UCLA L. Rev. 1791, 1846 (1992) [hereinafter Volokh, Freedom of Speech]; Eugene Volokh, How Harassment Law Restricts Free Speech, 47 Rutgers L. Rev. 563, 567 (1995) [hereinafter Volokh, How Harassment]; Eugene Volokh, What Speech Does “Hostile Work Environment” 1 2 FREE SPEECH AND HOSTILE ENVIRONMENTS objections focus on employer liability for speech by employers and employees that creates hostile environments. Virtually no one finds fault with regulating quid pro quo sexual harassment: Employers who tell employees “sleep with me or you’re fired” make threats that are not protected by the First Amendment.2 In this Essay I offer an account of why hostile environment doctrine, properly interpreted, does not violate freedom of speech.3 I address two basic kinds of objections. The first concedes that the creation of a hostile environment is not protected speech, but argues that fear of Title VII liability will lead employers to censor employee speech and that this chilling effect violates the First Amendment.4 I hope to show why these concerns are overstated through a discussion of the idea of collateral censorship—an important but largely overlooked concept in the theory of free speech. Collateral censorship occurs when A censors B out of fear that the government will hold A liable for the effects of B’s speech. I believe that the question of when collateral censorship is a permissible effect of regulation and when it is unconstitutional will be increasingly important in the law of telecommunications and cyberspace. In this case, however, the concept of collateral censorship helps us understand the constitutionality of hostile environment law. The second, and more radical attack on hostile environment liability argues that when employers create a hostile environment that materially alters working conditions to the disadvantage of women and minorities, they are engaged in protected speech.5 Rebutting this more radical attack helps us understand another important but undertheorized category in First Amendment law— Harassment Law Restrict?, 85 Geo. L.J. 627, 647 (1997) [hereinafter Volokh, What Speech]. 2. See, e.g., Nadine Strossen, The Tensions Between Regulating Workplace Harassment and the First Amendment: No Trump, 71 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 701, 704 (1995) (“Even the most diehard free speech absolutist recognizes that the speech involved in quid pro quo harassment is tantamount to threats or extortion.”); Volokh, Freedom of Speech, supra note 1, at 1800 (quid pro quo harassment is no more protected than “any other form of threat or extortion”). 3. In this Essay I shall primarily be concerned with sexual harassment, and, to a lesser extent, racial harassment. I do not discuss religious harassment. I think that accusations of religious harassment often raise distinctive problems. For example, some employees might object to proselytization by co-workers or provocative displays of religious paraphernalia. Although both of these can undoubtedly make workers feel uncomfortable, neither is the precise equivalent of racist and sexist speech designed to drive blacks and women from the workplace. The rules that govern these situations must be tailored to take these differences into account. 4. See, e.g., Browne, Title VII as Censorship, supra note 1, at 505, 510–13, 548; Volokh, Freedom of Speech, supra note 1, at 1809–14; Volokh, What Speech, supra note 1, at 635–37. 5. See, e.g., Browne, Title VII as Censorship, supra note 1, at 544–47. For related reasons, Eugene Volokh argues that hostile environment law should be limited to face-to-face verbal harassment directed at particular individuals. See Volokh, Freedom of Speech, supra note 1, at 1846. This implies that other forms of communicative harassment, even if they materially alter working conditions to the disadvantage of women and minorities, are protected speech and may not be limited on the basis of content, viewpoint, or subject matter. See id. at 1849. FREE SPEECH AND HOSTILE ENVIRONMENTS 3 captive audience doctrine. It also helps connect the captive audience doctrine more closely to what I regard to be the deeper purposes of antidiscrimination law. I. COLLATERAL CENSORSHIP Although threats are not protected by the First Amendment, hostile environments do not always involve threats. A hostile environment is made up of individual acts of discriminatory speech and other conduct by all the persons who inhabit a workplace, including managers, employees, and even occasionally clients and customers. In hostile environments, “the workplace is permeated with ‘discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult’ that is ‘sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of the victim’s employment and create an abusive working environment . .’”6 Some of this behavior may be directed at particular employees; other elements may be directed at no one in particular but may help foster an abusive environment. Even if individual acts do not constitute a hostile environment separately, they can be actionable when taken together. The test is whether the conduct, taken as a whole, would lead to an environment that the employee reasonably perceives as abusive.7 Employers can be liable for maintaining a hostile work environment even if management did not personally engage in any of the predicate acts. In Burlington Industries, Inc. v. Ellerth8 and Faragher v. City of Boca Raton,9 the Supreme Court held that employers are liable for harassment by supervisory personnel, subject to a number of affirmative defenses where the harassment did not result in a tangible employment action like firing or demotion.10 6. Harris v. Forklift Sys., Inc., 510 U.S. 17, 21 (1993) (quoting Meritor Sav. Bank v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57, 65, 67 (1986)). 7. See Harris, 510 U.S. at 21–23. 8. 524 U.S. 742 (1998). 9. 524 U.S. 775 (1998). 10. The Supreme Court’s current doctrine is that [a]n employer is subject to vicarious liability to a victimized employee for an actionable hostile environment created by a supervisor with immediate (or successively higher) authority over the employee. When no tangible employment action is taken, a defending employer may raise an affirmative defense to liability or damages, subject to proof by a preponderance of the evidence. The defense comprises two necessary elements: (a) that the employer exercised reasonable care to prevent and correct promptly any sexually harassing behavior, and (b) that the plaintiff employee unreasonably failed to take advantage of any preventive or corrective opportunities provided by the employer or to avoid harm otherwise. While proof that an employer had promulgated an anti-harassment policy with complaint procedure is not necessary in every instance as a matter of law, the need for a stated policy suitable to the employment circumstances may appropriately be addressed in any case when litigating the first element of the defense. And while proof that an employee failed to fulfill the corresponding obligation of reasonable care to avoid harm is not limited to showing any 4 FREE SPEECH AND HOSTILE ENVIRONMENTS The degree of vicarious liability for non-supervisory personnel (such as co-workers) is still contested, but currently most courts hold an employer liable if the employer knew or should have known of the harassment and did not take prompt corrective action.11 Employers who want to minimize hostile environment liability cannot merely prohibit individual instances of harassing conduct. They must also limit conduct that might, in combination with other conduct, contribute to a hostile environment. Hence employers are tempted to create prophylactic rules against all the potential components of a hostile environment. Some of these will be unwelcome physical advances, assaults, and forms of abuse. Others will be largely verbal: sexual jokes and innuendoes, taunts and threats, sexually oriented cartoons, pictures, and pornography.
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